Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time.

We’ve come a long way after all: microservices, the cloud, containers, serverless. Such novelties can help teams improve locally, but the larger the organization, the harder it becomes to reap the full benefits. The way teams are set up and interact is often based on past projects and/or legacy technologies (reflecting the latest org-chart design, which might be years old, if not decades).

This quote from Ruth Malan provides what could be seen as the modern version of Conway’s law: “If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.” Read More